Saturday, January 27, 2007

Conversations with heroes

Today I attended a lecture at the Berkeley Rep called "A Conversation with John Gottman". John Gottman is one of my heroes. For a long time, those of us who are couples therapists just went along with intuition as our guide. No one really knew what made relationships successful or not, they just went with what their intuition told them about relationships. So born were things like "active listening" in which one person talks and the other listens and repeats it back, and those types of things.

Turns out that doesn't really work for relationships. And the person who found that out - or one of them - is John Gottman. He's actually been doing research for 20 years now on what makes relationships work and he's willing to be proven wrong. He claims he can predict with 94% accuracy whether a relationship will survive or not, based on certain factors.

If you are interested in self-help books about relationships, his books are highly readable for the public. His lecture today was also highly entertaining and informative.